Varys
Varys is INFJ. He was the most informed person in the realm for forty years and nobody knew how. His network of little birds, his management of information across five kings, his consistent positioning for the specific outcome his synthesis had identified as the most available good for the most available people - all of it conducted from a position of near-total concealment. He does not want power. He wants the synthesis implemented. When the synthesis fails to converge on a viable outcome, he says so directly to the person most likely to kill him for saying it.
Varys and the INFJ Mind
Varys is INFJ. The type is defined by a hierarchy of cognitive functions - not a checklist of traits but an ordered stack of mental processes that determines how someone perceives the world and how they make decisions. For Varys, that stack leads with Ni (Introverted Intuition) and is supported by Fe (Extraverted Feeling). Understanding that order explains not just what Varys does but why - and why they respond the way they do under pressure, in relationships, and at the turning points of their arc.
Varys holds two things simultaneously that most people cannot: a long-range vision of how things should be, and a precise sensitivity to how people actually feel right now. Ni (Introverted Intuition) is the dominant function - it works beneath the surface, synthesising observations and patterns into convictions that arrive complete and are difficult to dislodge once formed. Fe (Extraverted Feeling) is the auxiliary - it ensures that the vision is always held in relation to people, not just to abstract principles. The combination produces someone who is both visionary and deeply empathic, often to the point of exhaustion. The inferior Se (Extraverted Sensing) is where Varys is most vulnerable: the immediate physical and present-tense reality can ambush them in ways the long-range pattern-recognition never modelled.
What makes Varys a compelling example of INFJ is not that they demonstrate every item on the type description, but that the function stack holds under pressure. In the moments that define their story in Game of Thrones (HBO) / A Song of Ice and Fire - the decisions under stress, the failures of judgment, the rare moments of genuine growth - the pattern is consistent. The dominant function is what Varys reaches for first. The inferior function is what catches them off guard.
How INFJ Processes the World
Every INFJ operates through the same hierarchy of cognitive functions. Here is how that stack maps onto how Varys actually thinks, decides, and acts.
Varys: What the INFJ Profile Explains
Varys was the most informed person in the realm for forty years and nobody knew how. His network of little birds - children, servants, the people institutional power ignores - is the INFJ's Fe auxiliary in its most complete institutional expression: the function that reads what people most fundamentally need and want, deployed at scale as the most available intelligence instrument. He does not coerce information from people. He reads them and they tell him.
His consistent positioning across five kings is the Ni synthesis applied to the specific question of what the realm requires over a generational timeframe. He is not loyal to kings. He is loyal to the synthesis's most complete available assessment of what stable, humane governance requires - and he adjusts his institutional position to whatever configuration best serves that synthesis. When Daenerys's advisors fail her by telling her what she wants to hear, Varys refuses. The synthesis has produced its verdict. The Fe confirmed it. He tells her directly and writes the letters anyway.
His death is the INFJ's most honest relationship to its own operational limit: the synthesis produced the correct assessment, the Fe read Daenerys correctly, and the inferior Se had not accumulated adequate data about what telling the truth to that specific person in that specific moment would cost before it was too late to matter.
Varys: INFJ Letter by Letter
He is the most socially capable person in King's Landing and the most internally private. His genuine opinions, his actual plans, his real assessment of the people around him - none of these are available to anyone in the show, including the audience for most of it. He presents exactly what he has decided to present and holds everything else in the interior where it cannot be used against him or the synthesis.
He thinks across generations. His management of the Targaryen restoration, his assessment of Daenerys's potential and its limits, his positioning for outcomes that most of the characters around him cannot yet see as possible - these are all Ni operating at its most complete. He is not responding to the current political situation. He is managing toward a configuration the synthesis has identified as the most available correct outcome for the realm.
Every political position he holds traces back to a genuine commitment to what governance should do for the people it governs. He grew up without power in the most complete available sense and has spent forty years building the most available institutional framework for ensuring that power serves people rather than destroys them. This is not abstract ideology. It is the Fe reading what specific powerless people need and the synthesis building toward providing it.
When the synthesis produces a verdict, he acts on it - even when acting means his own death. His letters about Daenerys are written and sent before he is caught. The decision has been made. The INFJ does not reverse a verdict once the Ni and Fe have confirmed it together, even when the cost of maintaining the verdict is terminal. He writes the letters. He is found. He walks to the beach without apparent resistance. The synthesis was complete. The implementation was complete. What follows is simply what follows.
Why Varys Is INFJ, Not INFP or INTJ
Varys is sometimes typed INFP - the personal depth, the values-driven positioning, the apparent discomfort with institutional violence. But INFP generates from the interior outward. Varys synthesises what each specific political configuration requires and the Fe builds the most available institutional instrument for implementing the synthesis. He is not expressing personal values. He is building toward a vision of what the realm requires. That vision-first, people-as-instruments quality is INFJ, not INFP.
INTJ is close and the case is strong. The distinction is the Fe: Varys's most important tool is his ability to read what specific people need and want and feel. He uses this reading as intelligence, yes, but it also shapes his genuine commitments - to the small folk, to the idea that power should serve people rather than the reverse. For INTJ, the people would have been more purely instrumental.
The INFJ Personality
Visionary and private. INFJs have an unusually clear sense of where things are heading, and quietly orient themselves and others toward it. Their empathy is real but operates from insight, not emotion alone.